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To Roast a H.yre with Cream-sauce

A hare roasted with milk, herbs, butter, flour, and chopped liver, finished with a cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

To Roast a H.yre with Cream-sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Boil the liver and chop it very fine.

  2. Mix a small portion of the liver with the stuffing.

  3. Reserve the rest of the liver for the sauce.

Roast the hare

  1. Place the sweet herbs in a roasting pan.

  2. Pour the milk over the herbs.

  3. Baste the hare continually with the milk.

  4. When the hare is more than half roasted, remove the milk.

  5. Add another quart of milk to the herbs.

  6. Slit the neck of the hare to allow the gravy to run into the milk.

  7. Skewer the head back down.

  8. Continue basting with milk until 20 minutes before serving.

  9. Remove the milk.

  10. Baste with butter.

  11. Dredge with flour twice.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine the two quantities of milk.

  2. Stir in butter and flour.

  3. Add the chopped liver.

  4. Warm gently without boiling.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + livertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hare
Forms the main meat, which sets and browns as it roasts.
Milk
Keeps the meat moist while basting and forms the base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the surface brown while basting.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it turns creamy and coats the meat.
Liver
Adds rich, savoury depth to the stuffing and the sauce.

The step that matters

Warm the sauce gently without boiling. A milk sauce thickened with flour can scorch on the bottom of the pan or separate and turn grainy if it boils. Gentle heat lets the flour thicken it smoothly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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